There are lots of ways to die in video games. One particular type of video game, the Roguelike, has lots and lots of ways to die. Some of these deaths are just bad luck; the player got a raw deal. Or perhaps the player got overconfident. Or maybe bored. Then there are deaths that, in retrospect, were utterly avoidable. Roguelike players tend to tell stories about these deaths, and their stories tend to have a title in common: Yet Another Stupid Death.

Examples:

The worst of the deaths probably being trying to use a fishing rod and then killing yourself by hooking yourself.

Same goes for Rogue, Angband, Dwarf Fortress, and Japanese console roguelikes. note The community distinguishes between this trope (when it's (almost) entirely the player's fault that they died) and Yet Another Annoying Death (for when the Random Number God is out to get you; common with some of the One-Hit Kill methods of death).

For added fun, the game Dungeon Crawl takes Rogue and minimizes the number of cheap, Random Number God -related deaths, leaving you with a mostly fair game which takes pleasure in setting you up with situations where you'll cause your own end. As the page quote says, if you die, it's pretty much your own fault.

Scorched Earth: firing a superweapon (or napalm) at just the right angle — and 0 power.

The first Command & Conquer game has a good reason why you should NEVER group soldiers together if they're all carrying Flamethrowers.

Killed by standing in fire in Diablo. Another would be people killed by repeatedly attacking bosses with a damage reflecting shield up, because any time you have to hit yourself to death you deserve to die.

World of Warcraft: any game mechanic that can kill a player who is standing still (or in some cases, not standing still!) is referred to as a "retard check", at least as long as there's some warning before it goes off.

It's not at all rare for people putting a raid together to specify that you must be able to move out of the fire.

Space Quest series: Roger Wilco is notable for the many and interesting ways he can die, including from player stupidity. There's even a site devoted to chronicling them. They are also among the few games where replaying value largely comes from finding out new, interesting ways to die.

As with Space Quest, Quest for Glory is a Sierra game, giving the player ample opportunity to kill yourself through player stupidity, carelessness, dickery, or obviously biting off more than you can chew. The stupidest of these being that the player can actually jam his own lockpick up his nose and kill himself.

Mainline Shin Megami Tensei games are also conducive to YASD, since it is necessary for the player to learn to exploit the battle system in order to get through battles while taking as little damage as possible. Fighting the right enemies with the wrong mons is a great way to earn a Game Over screen.

In one level of Ghost Trick, you must save Cabanela from being shot by swapping the bullet with something of the same shape right after it's fired. The right object is a soft knit hat, but you can also swap it with a metal hard hat... which, since it's still traveling at bullet speeds, will kill Cabanela even more brutally than the bullet would.

In an earlier level, you have to save a truck driver from being incapacitated by a loud noise he hears from his headphones and crashing into a restaurant. If you end up in the truck while he's driving it, at which point it's already too late to save him, you might end up trying to manipulate his recliner seat. This winds up with him flat on his back while the truck is still driving, you can't put it back up due to his weight, and to top it all off, he falls backwards hard enough to actually tear off the steering wheel. He ends up crashing in the same way, just in a more ludicrous position.

The comparatively obscure puzzle game The Omega Stone deliberately invites these. Attempt to "use" an electric fence at your own risk, and save the game before pressing any giant red buttons.

Infiniminer: Find any good player that plays on servers that have lava in them and ask how many times they accidentally dug right under lava with no means of escape.

Another common unintentional suicide is digging straight down and digging out a tile that has a 12-tile or more drop under it. For reference, you can take a fall of exactly 11 tiles and live when running an unmodified client. This does lead to some unusual traps, such as an 11-tile drop landing on a blue force field (which means blues can't survive the fall).

In Super Mario Bros., it's a tradition to die on one's first Goomba. This happens to newbies who need more practice with the controls.

Your first Goomba in New Super Mario Bros. will probably do this all over again. Goombas now do little hops in time with the background music. If you head right as soon as you have control over Mario, the Goomba will hop just as you try to jump on it.

In New Super Mario Bros. Wii multiplayer, you can retreat into a bubble whenever you like, float past the hard stuff, and get someone to pop you out later on. This can lead to situations where you're playing with 4 players, and everyone decides at the same time "this part's too hard, time for the bubble!", resulting in four trapped players and a trip back to the last checkpoint. The game itself hangs a lampshade on the stupidity of this death — if everyone is in bubbles, you get a special "level failed" music riff, instead of the normal death tune.

There you are, doing a bit of stunt flying in a high speed jet, you exit the aircraft to start skydiving, and BAM!. You get killed by the wing of your own plane.

In La-Mulana; you will be having quite a few of these moments, much so that there are Steam Achievements for dying to specific traps. The most obvious ones being hitting any wall in any room that has the Eye of Divine Retribution in it.

Fire Emblem's healers. Probably true of a lot of Tactical RPGs, but in a lot of circumstances they will go down with one hit (or two, but that's generally only one enemy attack since their speed isn't very good). There's a lot of ways to accidentally leave them in range of one or two enemies, usually involving planning something out ahead of time, moving your healer, changing your plan without thinking about the healer, moving around other guys that were originally protecting (or were about to protect) the healer, and... oops. They're usually very valuable too.

Worms. Destructible terrain + weapons that make large explosions = your hilarious yet stupid death. For added laughs, factor in weapons affected by the wind and poor aim, coupled with chain reactions involving worms self-destructing at 0HP, mines, and explosive barrels. Bonus points if a whole island formation is partially gutted and leveled by the result.

Hilariously, if the homing pigeon in Worms 3D can't find its target (which, most of the time if fired by a human player, it can't), it will execute a "return to sender" maneuver.

Another one involves the graphics of the game. It is very possible to be blown by a missile to the edge of the lake, and survive despite being neck high in water. However any attempts at moving that worm will instantly kill him.

Some deaths/endgames in the Nancy Drew games fall under this. Notable ones include repeatedly spraying pesticide into your face, deliberately lowering a suspended chandelier and getting kicked out of the house, and eating baking soda and jellyfish sandwiches.

Letting agents stay too clustered together when one of them is carrying a primed, unthrown grenade.

A documented bug that some people will try to use makes this all the more likely. In short, grenades can ONLY explode when on the ground, and unconscious/dead agents have their grenades treated as if they're on the ground.

Using Auto-fire at medium-to-long ranges when scouts are at risk of getting hit.

Letting the weak-minded carry all sorts of powerful or explosive weaponry when facing enemies with psionics. Bonus points if they're holding armed grenades when they panic. Jackpot if a soldier holding a loaded Blaster Launcher goes berserk.

Forgetting to use Aimed Shot when wielding a Rocket Launcher armed with Large Rockets.

Poor usage of Blaster Bombs in general, ranging from riskily placed waypoints with no compensation for slight drift to usage of directly vertically placed waypoints in certain versions of the game.

Allowing an agent to Reaction Fire a loaded Blaster Launcher or Rocket Launcher.

Forgetting where you placed armed Proximity Grenades and letting Agents trip them off while hunting down the last aliens.

A tank missile blowing up on the ground right in front of the tank. Miraculously, nobody was killed.

King's Quest VII: had so many of these, and it took so much effort to find them, and the "Game Over" screens were so mercilessly (and hilariously) condescending, half of them might as well be Easter Eggs. In particular, there is a puzzle that involves a wandering ghost-traveler who died of thirst and now aimlessly meanders about the desert. Valanice can, with some puzzle solving, turn as much salt water into fresh water as she likes, one clay potful at a time, but this first requires her to gain salt water as an inventory item. Giving the Far-Walker fresh water allows him to slake his thirst, but giving him salt water pisses him off. Doing it enough times makes him kill you.

It also has such delightful lines as, "Well, it would seem that keeping a lit firecracker in one's pocket isn't the best course of action."

Spelunky. This playthrough features a particularly nasty one a few minutes in. The player (who, coincidentally, is the same player who is quoted above regarding NetHack's Wand of Death) is shot by an angered shopkeeper while literally standing on the unlocked entrance to the City of Gold. Because he had the scepter, which instakills enemies with a homing attack, he would have survived had he walked more slowly, a fact that he immediately lampshades. In a later Let's Play, he mentions both the incident and the fact that it was quoted on This Very Wiki.

The game even keeps track of how many deaths you've had (up to the first 50 or so) via marks on the wall at the cave entrance.

Shadow Caster:

Forgetting to change to Kahpa (or at the very least back to Kirt from Maorin, who drowns quickly [as in less than one second after you submerge]) when going underwater.

Switching to Caun when there's a mobile enemy anywhere near you. Super regeneration doesn't help when you're practically as fragile as glass!

In Torin's Passage, funny deaths were often a few seconds away, but your last act of the game invites the chance to make such an incredible Violation of Common Sense, that a secret message from producer Al Lowe plays over the death screen pointing out how utterly insane a player must be to sneak up silently behind the Big Bad only to start playing the bagpipes. (Yes, it's another Sierra game, why do you ask?)

In Sa Ga Frontier, In Red's scenario you can fall off the Cygnus during a segment where the player has to run across the pathway of the bridge, while on the outside. And, at a later point in the same scenario, in the Black Ray; you have to run through the corridors in a specific pattern after the alarm sounds until the meter states you are in proximity of Black X Base, going back to earlier visited rooms of the ship will force you to fight Metal Black 2. Doing so before the meter says you are near the base will cause you to get a game over.

In Return To Zork, there are a lot of not-so-obvious ways to die, such as opening both hatches on the furnace at the same time. Then there's stuff that is very obvious, such as the broken bridge in West Shanbar (see 3:12 in). Darwin award, however, goes out to deliberately setting things up for grues to get you, such as removing illuminate from your equipment in the tunnels.

The entire Zork saga has a plethora of these. Special mention must go to wandering around without a light source in any Zork game (the game even warns you first!), jumping in the Bottomless Pit in Zork: Grand Inquisitor, or staying in the same room with the plastic explosive in Zork II and waiting for it to go off.

If you're playing with only 3HP, have fun dying from enemies and their unpredictable actingnote The Gaudi are particularly good examples of this.

You will suffer this in ADOM if you just Attack! Attack! Attack!, but even veterans aren't immune to forgetting to equip a weapon after dropping it on an altar. Other YASDs: accidentally using Fireball on your vastly more powerful companion; fighting ghuls without paralyzation resistance; coming across a greater mimic and trying to melee it; stepping onto a chaotic altar when an intelligent chaotic monster is nearby; and many, many more.

ThunderDome MUD is full of these, among them: trying to kill Justice (an invincible NPC integral to the game's court mechanic), drinking gasoline (it's stupid enough keeping gasoline in the same container type as your water), jumping a bike across a river and pausing, speedwalking through a desert known to be trap-infested, and attacking what appears without close examination to be 'a guy' who turns out to be a well-known self-reviving killing machine.

Demon's Souls. The game will punish you for your avoidable mistakes... HARSHLY.

One of the stupidest and most avoidable death traps happens early on in the game. In Boletaria Palace 1-1, there's an obvious pit in the floor surrounded by enemies. Nobody would dream of jumping into that, right? It's actually a very common occurrence, due to the fact that there are swirly blue glowing things in the middle of the abyss. Countless players have thought that it was some sort of portal to another area, or that there was an item down below, only to step boldly in and turn themselves into a red stain at the bottom of the pit three stories below. YASD indeed.

Making the pit in the ground even more facepalm-y is that there actually is stuff down there, but the only way to get to it is to find a different path down into the pit. If that glowing blue swirl weren't there, you could theoretically jump down onto one of the precarious ledges below. The whole thing just seems like poor design and/or purposeful game dev bastardry.

Same goes for Dark Souls. Getting slaughtered by a big badass monster you just encountered is par for the course. Trying to rush through the Undead Burg and getting gutted by a basic Hollow? Priceless.

In the Runescape Dungeoneering skill, you can actually win awards by dying like this. Fortunately, they do not affect gameplay at all.

Minecraft has plenty of these. The stupidest (and most avoidable) is digging straight up, especially when you're very deep underground, which often leads to gravel, sand, or water landing on your head, suffocating you. Or lava. Another common death is digging straight down, either as an efficient way to mine or while working on some building project, and then you realize there's a gaping chasm below you... or, again, lava.

Ever since the "creep" mechanic was introduced (which allows you to stand on the very edge of something, making it easier to build bridges, etc.), death by falling has increased dramatically when people accidentally let up on the SHIFT key and go plummeting hundreds of feet to the ground!

"Don't dig straight down" actually reached memetic status briefly on the official forums, just because it seemed to be happening so much.

Funny story: At least one fellow on the official forums seemed to think this was some kind of actual rule (as opposed to just being sound advice) and acted as though he was some kind of iconoclast for doing it on a regular basis.

While the modern Prince of Persia games are fairly easy, at some point you won't know where the hell to go, so you'll have to rely on "what if I jump this way". Good thing you can rewind time and die yet again.

By the way, if you die in battle and not rewind back enough, chances are you will die again in the exact same manner. Where it gets really annoying is when you realize you only had enough sand to rewind once...

Jurassic Park: Trespasser is a first-person shooter which introduced a number of innovative features, notably modelling a full player body in the game world, which included a fully-articulated and very awkward-to-control arm. This resulted in some of the most amusingly stupid ways to kill oneself, including beating oneself to death with a baseball bat and flailing a loaded shotgun against a wall in a vain attempt to point it towards an oncoming raptor, only to have it go off in one's face.

Another one comes in that dead dinosaurs still have active damaging areas, meaning it is entirely possible to accidentally walk over a dead dinosaur and die because you stepped into a mouth of pointy teeth.

Soul Calibur III: In the event match against the Colossus, the entire match is fought hacking at the enemy's ankles, as he's much larger than you. If you win, he finally falls. Forward. Don't just stand there.

Dungeons Of Dredmor actually gives you Achievements on Steam for several stupid deaths, from trying to fight the demon running the shops, to blowing yourself up with a Horadic Lutefisk Cube, to spraining your ankle kicking a door when you're on 1HP.

You also get achievements for dying in the tutorial, dying to a Diggle (the Mascot Mook / Goomba of the game), and also dying to a Thrusty, whose only form of attack is... pelvic thrusting. Interestingly enough, you also get an achievement if the game itself dies a stupid death (that is, the game crashes).

The early Tomb Raider series offers more than enough opportunities to die horribly and/or embarrassingly, such as hanging out on subway tracks, touching electrified fences despite signs and other warnings, and stepping on a giant disembodied hand in a level named after King Midas. Or you could skip the middleman and just dive head first onto solid ground and break your neck. If you haven't already accidentally stumbled off of a ledge and died on impact.

In Baldur's Gate II, there is a corridor where both sides look kind of like a clamp. Take a step in the middle of them, and they will close, killing you.

In Time Gal, when Time Stop is active, you have to choose the correct answer before time runs out. Let's take one of the levels for example. If you use Time Stop, you have three choices; Pray to God, Jump into the ocean, or Jump to the ship. Two of them are incorrect answers; you can't select "Jump to the ship," because Reika will not make it. You cannot select "Pray to God," either, because Reika will end up going to heaven after the plane blows up, so the right answer is "Jump into the ocean."

In Skyrim, falling to your death is this. It's rare in this game for the player to be put into a position where falling to their death could be anybody else's fault. The Deathlords and Ulfric Stormcloak, pretty much the only enemies really capable of knocking you around, are almost always encountered in enclosed areas.

The Ebony Warrior introduced in the Dragonborn expansion was sort of a Bonus Boss but, given the requirements to even see him when he was introduced (be level 80 at a time when the effective level cap was 81), he wasn't much of a challenge. That said, there were many reports, especially among those who abused the Resto-loop of losing to him instantly and repeatedly. Why? The Ebony Warrior had the Reflect Damage heavy armor perk, which would return their 36,000 point sword strike right in their face. What makes it YASD-worthy is that many of the players simply never thought to trade down to a less-overpowered weapon to fight him and some player complained at the time that he was impossible to beat.

It's also perfectly possible, during the questline to return Meridia's Beacon to have Meridia drop you from the sky, where you then die on impact.

In VampireQuest, from www.vampyou.com, there are a good few of these that are rather fun. One of which, which unlocks a separate little mini-mode, is purposely lighting four braziers that are bluntly said to only be lit if you want to turn yourself into a vampire. Since the goal is to defeat the vampires... it's acknowledged as ridiculously stupid. Each leads to a rather fun scene, generally.

In Resident Evil 4, shooting into the lake results in Del Lago jumping out and swallowing Leon whole. The canyon with the second El Gigante has boulder traps you can not only drop on the boss, but also yourself.

And let's not forget El Gigante falling on you after you've killed him. Another El Gigante one is the boss fight against two of them. You can take out one by tricking it into the lava cauldron in the middle of the floor. However, getting close to it in its death throes will have it grab you and pull you into the lava as well.

In Path of Exile, you do your healing and mana regen through flask4 that can have different attributes for the amount recovered, how quickly, extra defenses, and so forth. There's one type called "Caustic" which costs a percentage of maximum health to use. There's a passive skill that grants you immunity to certain types of damage, but reduces your health to maximum 1 HP. Forget that you have a "caustic flask," the skill with only 1HP, and that the game rounds up, and you can do the math.

There is a passive skill and gem that lets you pay mana from your HP. It's not recommended to use these two with the above-mentioned passive skill.

Many of the deaths in Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure are illogical and can only be figured out via trial and error, but some of them can only be discovered through stupidity. For example, in "The Flute of the Growlin' Goblins", you have to poison the goblin's soup. After they die, you can click on the soup cauldron to drink some yourself.

The X-Universe forums over at the Egosoft site get a thread about these once every few months. One of the best was a player telling his ship to collect astronauts while EVA, which resulted in him being run over by the ship like an SUV over a soda can. A typical thread.

Way back in the days of X-Tension there was a YASD that hit a lot of first-time players. A common tactic to blow up superfast Xenon destroyers was to put a station in-between yourself and one of them. The destroyer would barrel at you full speed and then, thanks to Artificial Stupidity, detect the obstacle too late to pull out of the unintentional ramming maneuver. One kaboom later you had a dead destroyer, a bunch of dropped resources nearby, and an exulting player - unless said player was stationed too close to the station. What most newbies failed to realize - because stations don't otherwise ever move - was that they aren't locked in place by the game engine and the physics model still applies to them. As a result, that destroyer piledrive just gave a good shove to that Xenon station. Smash! Game over.

FTL: Faster Than Light gives us, in order of increasing "D'oh!", depleting your stock of drones or missiles (making a fight unwinnble if you rely on them), depleting your fuel (forcing you to wait and pray to the RNG for a event that gives you some, while the Rebel Fleet draws closer and closer), losing your crew aboard an enemy ship through, in order, it escaping, you escaping, or blowing it up, and finally, having your crew suffocate because you forgot to close an airlock or turn the life support back on.

More finally, dying during the tutorial because you opened all the doors (including the outer airlock doors) for shits & giggles. The game mocks you for this.

The Witch's House has lots of ways to die. Some are very tricky, but others, like trying to walk on an extremely thin plank and opening a door behind which something big and unfriendly can be heard before feeding it first, are obvious Shmuck Bait.

Happens in Magicka to experienced and new players. Because you need to combine elements to cast spells, players who are panicking can select random elements and cast them, resulting in spectacular suicides.

Some stealth games, such as Thief, let you activate the security alarms that were supposed to be for the guards to use, resulting in either instant mission failure or quickly getting overwhelmed by enemies.

Galaga: Getting your ship captured allows you to recapture it to obtain the double ship. However, getting your ship captured depletes your life stock by one. Not checking your life counter before hurling yourself into the tractor beam is asking for "FIGHTER CAPTURED" to be followed by "GAME OVER".

You can also accidentally shoot the ship you're trying to save, destroying it.

Borderlands 2 has a quest called "Kill Yourself", in which the Big Bad pays you to jump off a cliff. Then again, seeing as he pays you in valuable Green Rocks and you respawn immediately afterward anyway...

Both Borderlands games also have a lot of stupid ways to get yourself downed (and sometimes dead), like taking cover near Exploding Barrels or being a little too carefree with grenades. Alternately, forgetting how your various skills work is also a good way to accidentally cripple yourself, especially as Krieg thanks to his self-destructive skill sets. Hooray, you've lit an enemy on fire! Too bad now you're on fire too as a result of your Hellborn skills, and you started with less health.

Because of the sheer variety of equipment, classes, and scenarios in the game, everyone has a possible way to die in a stupid and preventable manner in Team Fortress 2. Most of these stupid deaths usually require a lack of player foresight. For instance, a Demoman forgetting where his Sticky Bombs are and detonating them while standing on top or next to them, or a Soldier attempting to Rocket Jump with less than 50 health. Other wonderfully dumb ways to die include standing on a teleporter exit when it is charged (a great way to receive a Tele-Frag), or taunting an enemy, which leaves your character immobile, while right in the path of a stage hazard. Stories abound of death cam screenshots showing a runaway train in the background barreling towards a taunting, immobile, and soon to be flattened enemy.

In beatmania IIDX, it's not uncommon to hear stories of someone selecting a song and forgetting to turn off Hard or EX-Hard gauge after the previous stage. Sometimes a chart is easier with Hard gauge, thereby averting this trope, but EX-Hard will simply make charts harder no matter what.

In fact, forgetting your mods is a YASD for all rhythm games that have them. In Dance Dance Revolution and In The Groove, for example, you can set the speed modifier to a high number like 3X for a 120 BPM song, then leave it like that for a much faster song, resulting in arrows that move up the screen faster than one can react. It doesn't help that some boss songs in both series have their BPM arbitrarily doubled. Another rhythm game YASD is being caught off-guard at the start of the song; in most such games, some songs start gameplay faster than others, and start you with a health gauge that's only half full.

Bomberman: Who hasn't blown themselves up with one of their own bombs? It's more understandable in multiplayer when everyone's trying to manipulate each other into getting blown up, but the feeling of stupidity amplifies in single-player modes.

You can also drop off your only Non-KO'd party member in the PC. You'll black out three steps later, as the players of Twitch Plays Pokémon Red found out.

Though to be fair, that's only in the first generation, as later games prevent you from getting rid of your last non-fainted Pokemon. Which is exactly what made Twitch run into that problem in the first place...

In Risen, dying by falling from high places counts as this. If there are any human or ogre characters in the area, they may make comments about your stupidity, and the third time it happens, you'll gain an achievement simply called "Idiot".

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